‘You’ve let the fox into the henhouse’: Inside the fight for cricket’s future

On night three of the SCG Ashes Test, a large crowd gathered at the Paddington home of the Cricket NSW chair John Knox for what has become a customary post-play soirée to cap cricket’s holiday season.

Cricket Australia chair Mike Baird and chief executive Todd Greenberg were there, alongside a host of notable figures who had all been at the cricket that day, including Venues NSW chair and Cricket NSW director David Gallop. The state association’s patron, former Prime Minister John Howard was a guest, as were Marylebone Cricket Club president Ed Smith and some members of the media.

With the urn secured and the Sydney Test mercifully pushing beyond two days, CA powerbrokers were turning their attention to their revolutionary plan to sell off stakes in Big Bash League teams.

Beneath the convivial atmosphere fuelled by champagne and canapés, however, fault lines were already starting to form.

‘This may well be a better alternative’

Lee Germon, the Cricket NSW chief executive, told this masthead that by the time of the SCG Test, his board had already moved towards a collective view that privatisation was a bad idea.

Over the summer, CNSW was advised by Adara Partners, in particular the former Goldman Sachs chair and current Melbourne Cricket Club vice-president Christian Johnston, as directors hardened in their opposition to the sale.

“We agreed it needed to be explored,” Germon said. “But it was probably towards the end of last year when we were collectively able to drill deeper into what privatisation looked like and we started to feel we needed to really consider this really strongly and assess the risks involved.

“We were moving towards saying no. We’d started to consider the option of not privatising, and the more we looked at what another option could look like, the more we said ‘this may well be a better alternative’.

“The BBL had a good season. The Ashes reinforced the importance of international cricket as a revenue driver, and how we would become even more reliant on international cricket if we gave away BBL profits to private investors. We have a well-functioning cricket ecosystem, and we need to look at how we can retain that.”

This week, those fault lines left Baird, Greenberg and CA without consensus on whether to go to the next stage of their BBL sale plan – seeking expressions of interest and valuations for clubs via Barrenjoey Capital Partners. While less vocal in their objections, Queensland Cricket have asked for more time to consider their position.

Other states contacted by this masthead indicated that this next step could still be taken regardless of Cricket NSW, because five clubs in four states have written to CA to say they are happy to proceed in what is still a non-binding process.

CA’s board, chaired by Baird, has a regular meeting next week where directors will choose whether to give the go-ahead to Barrenjoey without the assent of NSW. But Germon made it clear that Australian cricket’s biggest state wants the whole discussion to change.

“Being against privatisation we don’t see the need to go there,” he said. “To soft-test the market is going to take time and resources. We would much prefer to see those resources spent on assessing and discussing the other, self-funding strategy we’ve put forward.

“There’s been a lot of excellent work done on privatisation strategy by Cricket Australia that’s been discussed over a period of time, and now we would like to see due consideration given to the alternative strategy, which is not selling our clubs and keeping them within our cricket ecosystem.

“We don’t agree with privatisation so we don’t agree to test the market, but also that we believe our time and resources are better spent drilling down to see if we can make this alternative strategy work.”

Australian cricket’s cash crunch

The most persuasive arguments put across to the states by Greenberg have related to Australian cricket’s financial outlook without the injection of private capital.

Greenberg has depicted a troubling trend for CA and the states, whereby a $140 million war chest in 2018 has been whittled down to nothing due to the annual costs of funding the game and paying the players.

Further into the future, CA forecasts have cast doubt on how much money might come in from broadcast deals at home and abroad, and also placed a question mark next to the parcel of funding that comes from world cups via the International Cricket Council.

Germon stressed that his state was not disputing the veracity of these forecasts, but wanted to work with CA on alternative ways to improve them.

“What we have said to CA is let’s look at whether we can have any impact on these forecasts. We don’t disagree with them, but can we look at them and improve the revenues and find a way to self-fund this.”

One of the areas suggested for revenue improvement is by seeking more money from wagering companies through higher product fees.

The first version of a NSW “alternative strategy” was shared with CA and the states several weeks ago, and got a tepid reception. Germon said that “based on feedback”, a more detailed strategy was shared around this week. Negotiations are set to continue, but as it stands the next formal meeting of CA and state leaders will not take place before June.

Cricket Victoria, which had initially been a strong objector to selling, flipped to the affirmative view over summer, largely because the state was swayed towards CA’s assessment of the balance sheet.

All states have been told to brace for significant funding cuts if the status quo remains.

What about the players?

Even if CA and NSW sort out their differences, the next step will be to cut a deal with the Australian Cricketers Association. The need to pay players better money to play in the BBL has long been a key plank of the privatisation debate.

But here, too, there is a major fault line. The vast majority of cricket decision-makers around the country have tended to the view that the player payment pool needs to be recut, rather than increased, handing more money to the likes of Pat Cummins and Travis Head and less to state cricketers and lower end W/BBL squad members.

ACA chief executive Paul Marsh, who returned to cricket last year after a decade with the AFLPA, has made it clear that the players will be pushing for a significantly bigger slice of the pie – up from around 27 per cent of Australian cricket revenue to somewhere beyond 30 per cent.

“From the information we are being provided by CA it sounds as though progress is being made on the first part of this process, which is CA and the states reaching agreement on a way forward,” Marsh told this masthead.

“The next part of the process is for CA and the ACA to reach agreement on a new MOU. Privatisation of the W/BBL can’t proceed without this and there is a lot of work ahead of us to agree.”

One former player who has been a voluble contributor to the debate, via his ABC podcast, is the Cricket NSW board director Ed Cowan. His views have underlined how deep the divide has become.

“Do you think Indian owners of Big Bash teams care if the Test team are producing Test players or any other domestic player pathway? Of course not. So you’ve let the fox into the henhouse,” Cowan said last month.

“Is there a world where cricket could be in line with the AFL and NRL [on wagering product fees]? It could take some time, but when you talk about product fees and commission … they already have betting, Bet365 is a major sponsor, it’s already there but they’re half-pregnant. So if that’s possible, guess what, your player payment pool expands.

“What I would like is the discussion, would we prefer to sell our future to the Indian Premier League teams, or allow for more betting. I don’t love betting, but would I prefer that to the game being decimated in the future and having no control of key assets? Absolutely I would.”

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